Automatic Test Case Configuration

Modern web application sling hundreds of fields back and forth between browser and server to deliver feature-rich pages and maintain state (HTTP is a stateless protocol). Many of these fields will be different for each pass through a scenario (i.e. they are dynamic fields) - and getting them wrong will usually bring your testing effort to a halt until fixed. With many script-based tools, configuring these fields is left to the tester. Load Tester™'s automatic configuration (which we call Automatic State Management - or ASM) will configure the vast majority of these dynamic fields for you.

The result is a dramatic increase in productivity compared to traditional script-based load testing tools - prompting many organizations to abandon those tools for Load Tester. One example is Mr. Jean-Luc ORTS, the Project Manager in charge of the load testing for the Caisse Nationale d'Asurance Vieillesse (the French-equivalent of the Social Security Administration). When asked why they switched to Load Tester, he responded:

"The differences are obvious in terms of productivity, design, and presentation of the results. In using Web Performance the design time is split by 4 or 5, even more if they are complex scenarios."

Examples of fields that Load Tester will automatically configure:

• Cookies
• Form Fields (when not entered by user)
• Hidden Form Fields, including .NET VIEWSTATE and related fields
• Query Parameters
• ETag headers
• If-Modified-Since headers
• Authentication headers
• Proxy headers
• XML Fields
• JSON fields

User-extendable Rules

The web is built on a broad range of web development frameworks and many of them create unique challenges for testing tools. While we continue to improve the automatic configuration in every release, we recognize that there will always be edge-cases that Load Tester cannot handle automatically. So Load Tester provides a framework for custom user-defined configuration rules that allow testers to leverage Load Tester's automatic configuration wizard to automatically configure even more fields, dramatically boosting their productivity.